Automation of Granollers Heuristic Evaluation Method Using a Developed Support System: A Case Study

Heuristic evaluation is one of the most popular usability methods since a group of usability evaluation experts can find approximately 75% of all usability problems in the reviewed interfaces. Due to its benefits, there are various proposals on how to carry out a heuristic evaluation. One of them is the proposal by Granollers. Although this evaluation method is practical, direct, and valuable to obtain a quantitative result of the percentage of usability this continues to be carried out manually by using a template. As part of this research, it was proposed to develop a system that supports the heuristic evaluation method of T. Granollers. Likewise, to measure the perception of the usability evaluators who used this new system in comparison with the template, it was proposed to carry out a case study in which two groups of evaluators could perform a heuristic evaluation using the method of Granollers to a transactional e-commerce website. Team A used the template to carry out the evaluation, while Team B used the proposed support system. The results allowed us to demonstrate that the team that used the support tool for the heuristic evaluation method of Granollers had a better perception of the evaluated TAM criteria. For this reason, the system is easy to use, it is perceived as useful for conducting evaluations, and evaluators have a great interest in using it in their heuristic evaluations, which highlights the importance of promoting the use of heuristic evaluation methods through automated tools available to usability experts.